Professional Work

After the success of Y tu mamá también (Mexico, Alfonso Cuarón 2001) and Diarios de motocicleta (Brazil, Walter Salles 2004), many Latin American road movies followed suit by borrowing Hollywood’s filmic blueprint for expressing young adult rebellion against constrictive social norms and oppressive social circumstances. Latin American film critics pursued the trend, studying close versions of the formula that featured the outlaw-couple-on-the-run: the identity quest of young adults and their search for freedom. Nevertheless, few critics have analyzed the narrativity of these road adventures, Latin American or otherwise, when said outlaws are not young adults but children or adolescents. In La misma luna (2007) and Sin nombre (2009), two recent road films concerning illegal immigration across the US-Mexico border, Mexican director Patricia Riggen (1970) and Californian director Cary Fukunaga (1977), respectively, re-appropriate and transform the established characteristics of the old Hollywood genre and in doing so revitalize the road film’s objective and reach. By moving the road movie trope from its point of origin—from “Sunset Boulevard” to “South of the Border”—and highlighting the purpose and agency that their young protagonists develop and sustain throughout their travels north, these films foreground the literal and metaphorical borders that undocumented and unaccompanied minors risk their lives to cross. Riggen and Fukunaga veer away from the law-breaking zeal typically exhibited by road film protagonists by evoking the innocence commonly ascribed to children and presenting unsullied images of their faces that work in sharp contrast to the inhospitable and dangerous borderlands they navigate. By reshaping the characteristics of the Hollywood genre, these directors move beyond depicting mainstream youth culture and coming-of-age experiences, reminding their audience of a too often forgotten part of the immigrant experience: unaccompanied minors and their illegal entrance into the United States.

Exhibitions

Seminars & Presentations

Renegotiating Gendered and Racialized (Excluded) Subjectivities in Times of Neoliberal Crises into the Track: Gender and Feminist Studies for the LASA2015 Congress taking place May 27 –30 in San Juan, Puerto Rico

“A Retrospective on Chilean Film.” Program Notes for the Cine las Americas Hispanic Film Festival in Austin, April 2009. <http://www.cinelasamericas.org/film-festival/43-news/27-chile-guest-country-at-cine-las-americas-2009>